He has one of the largest collections of pornography and erotica in the world, but don't call Clifford Scheiner a dirty old man.
The former Brooklyn emergency room doctor with a Ph.D. in sexuality has amassed an enormous hoard of 350,000 books, films and photos - from 13th century manuscripts to every issue of Playboy and Screw magazine ever printed.
"It is certainly one of the largest collections of erotology and sexology in the world," he says.
Scheiner, 61, of Flatbush, has been collecting since the late 1960s, but he insists his fascination is purely academic.
"I became interested because of the mystery involved," he said. "To hear people talk about it - nobody bought it, nobody sold it, nobody owned it, nobody printed it, nobody illustrated it and nobody bound it, but the books were there and that intrigued me."
He dove headfirst into books that took great effort to decipher.
"I taught myself to recognize most of the dirty words in most of the languages that use the Roman alphabet," he said. "I don't have huge language skills, but I get a pretty good idea of what is going on."
Ultimately, he went into the book business, starting a mail-order company, C.J. Scheiner Books. "I never paid retail for anything," he said.
Scheiner, born in Clifton, N.J., studied molecular biophysics and biochemistry at Yale, got a medical degree from SUNY Downstate and later earned a Ph.D. from the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco.
By the 1980s, the collection swelled, with people selling him rare texts, stacks of magazines, photographs, prints and film reels. All the while, he worked as an emergency room doctor at Kings County Hospital - a job he kept until 2003.
"I supported myself entirely from the book business. I wasn't spending any of my salary from being a doctor on the cost of daily living," he said. "I was dealing in things ranging from $5 to $85,000.
"Of course, I took a lot of money I made selling books and used it to buy more books," he added. "That's why I now have more than 350,000 items."
Scheiner's collection gives that of even the famed Kinsey Institute - with holdings of 430,000 items - a run for its money.
"He is one of the major collectors. I have lots of respect for his efforts and devotion and his experience," said Liana Zhou, Kinsey's director of collections.
For years, Scheiner kept his vast collection in a West Village space.
"The films and videos were in one place, the Tijuana bibles in another, original art in another, and newspapers and magazines in another," he said.
But in 2003, the building was sold and he was forced to move "160,000 pounds of books" with little notice. It all ended up jammed into a $5,000-a-month, 1,400-square-foot Flatbush storage facility, where it remains today.
"It looks like the warehouse from the last scene of 'Raiders of the Lost Ark,'" he said, adding that it puts a serious damper on his business.
"So many things are inaccessible," he said. "If somebody said, 'I absolutely have to have an item,' it might take me three months to find it."
In recent years, Scheiner has turned his interest to Orthodox Judaism and spends his days poring over the Torah and the Talmud.
In all, Scheiner estimates he has spent $1 million over the years on the collection. "But that is over a 30-year period, so actually it's like $30,000 a year," he said. "That isn't a whole lot."
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